Find the End
by RagingTiger
Summary: A survivor recounts the story of his escape from an urban hell in California. Original characters. Rated "M" for coarse language, adult situations, and violence.
1. Chapter 1

**April 5, 2011: Somewhere over San Navarro, CA  
3:00 AM**

My name's Danny Riviera and until a few days ago, I was just like you. I worked five days a week, owned a car, paid my taxes, went out to the bar with the buddies on Fridays. I had a decent job as a salesman for a Verizon Wireless dealer in the downtown district where half my day consisted of selling people bullshit and the other half being yelled at by angry customers. I loved baseball and hockey, my two favorite teams being the San Francisco Giants and San Jose Sharks respectively. I was just your average Joe, nothing special, nothing to write home about.

And then that all went to hell.

Now I'm sitting in the back of a US Army Black Hawk helicopter, a warm blanket over my shoulders. Two door gunners, both clad in dark khaki jumpsuits are busy firing their floor-mounted miniguns down into what appear to be masses of people filling the streets. But I know better. Those _things_ down there aren't people anymore; I don't even know what to call them. All I know is they die when you shoot them and I've killed too many of them to care.

According to what the crew chief and pilots have told me, this "infection" as they call it is expanding rapidly. San Navarro was the first outbreak in the Central Valley, but there were also reports of infection around the country, around the state, even around the world. From what the CDC has been able to determine, it's some form of virus that kills most of the brain's living tissue, reducing a human being to little more than our primary brain functions. It can be spread through coming into contact with infected blood, saliva, or tissue, but thankfully it's not airborne. Not yet anyways.

Before the television and radio went off the air in San Navarro, the governor declared martial law in California and mobilized the National Guard. He was then taken by helicopter to Travis Air Force Base where he was supposed to be evacuated via military aircraft to a "secure location." Before this could be accomplished however, the base was overrun and contact with his entourage was lost. National Guard and police units have been simultaneously trying to fight the infection and evacuate as many civilians as possible, although apparently this has become a "giant clusterfuck," as the pilot so eloquently put it. This helicopter is part of the 120th Air Wing of the Nevada National Guard and its destination is Moffett Field in Mountain View, CA.

You can also cross Sacramento, the San Joaquin Valley, and most of the East Bay off your list of habitable places to live. That is unless you like living next door to neighbors that would prefer to eat you alive. The Army has managed to hold back the Infected east of San Jose, although that line is in danger of collapsing at any moment. Civilians are being evacuated by whatever boats can be commandeered and there are aircraft constantly flying in and out of San Jose and San Francisco airports. The Navy is currently in the process of shelling areas overrun by the Infected and SEAL demolition teams are currently in the process of blowing the cross-bay bridges to slow the Infected down. Slowing the infected has proven to be little more than a temporary measure as the military are also fighting smaller secondary infections that are occurring behind their lines in many cases. In other words, the safe zones are not really all that safe.

The bone-vibrating bass of the miniguns cuts through the helicopter's cabin, nearly drowning out the sound of the rest of the crewmen trying to navigate this bird to safety. I poke my head out through the open doors of our transport and look down at the city below us. Only a few hours ago, this was one of California's major cities and a huge metropolitan hub for the West Coast. Population of 425,000. Now it's Corpseville. Where the dead walk and being alive is a liability.

I used to think zombies were something to laugh at. Jesus, I mean how seriously could you take a topic that was located somewhere between Overactive Imagination and Never Fucking Going to Happen? I watched _28 Days Later_ and _Night of the Living Dead_. I played games like Resident Evil. I even read World War Z at the request of a friend who thought the book was awesome and recommended it to me. And I still laughed it off as nothing more than a plot element. "It could never really happen. Zombies walking the earth? This could never come true, dude."

Ah, but it did. The sight of seeing your friends, co-workers, and family being torn to shreds by hideous caricatures of humanity is enough to make even the most cynical man believe.

If you asked me how this happened, I really couldn't tell you. I could relate countless stories of how myself and a few other lucky survivors fought our way through Hell to reach safety. I could spin tales about all the people we had to kill, all the times we thought we were done for, and even the people we lost. But I couldn't tell you how this whole goddamn shitty mess came to be. No fucking way.

There could be a million reasons behind why this happened. Maybe it was some sort of virus or plague. Or maybe Judgment Day's finally come, the day when evil will engulf the world. Hell maybe it's all a big joke and some Hollywood asshole will pop out of a cake and tell me to smile, that I'm on television.

But I can't worry about that now.

All I can do is try and make it to safety. I can't spare the time or the energy to dwell on theoretical situations or focus on the fucking philosophy of it all. I just need to live. I need to survive. And I will.

**I've come too far to die now**.


	2. The Beginning

Before the infection hit San Navarro, it was a pretty great place to live and I had a pretty good life going on there. Like most places in California's Central Valley, its roots lay in agriculture, but as the town had grown from a small farming station to a mid-size city, all sorts of industries had sprouted up, ranging from electronics manufacturing to food packaging and processing. My particular field of expertise was telecommunications or if you want to get real literal about it, cell phone sales. I humped a shitty job selling overpriced phones to people who really had no clue about the crap they were getting themselves into. Contracts, extensions, penalties, minutes, overages, roaming fees, and all that good commercial bullshit that's written into contracts for one thing: to separate people who don't know any better from their money.

I had moved to San Navarro from my hometown of San Jose, along with my childhood buddy, Brian Muller, a recent graduate of the University of California-Davis. Brian had finished a bachelor's degree in communication at UC Davis just a year before and had lucked out by landing an internal communications position for a company in San Navarro that processed and canned tomatoes. I on the other hand had gone to San Jose State on and off for three years before my dad was laid off and I had to drop out because we could no longer afford to pay tuition. At the time Brian had gotten the job, I was slumming around in San Jose, not really doing much of anything. Brian's suggestion that I move with him to San Navarro and try and find a job there was something that I took up immediately as a challenge.

Initially it sucked. Brian and I shared a two-bedroom duplex on Cranyard Street in East San Navarro, a largely working-class blue-collar neighborhood. Without a job, I had burned through most of my savings pretty quickly before I landed the job at the Verizon store. The job paid shit, but working full time, I was able to pay rent, utilities, and buy groceries, as well as having just enough left over for some spending money and even a little cash to send home to my parents. Brian's pay was a lot better, but his hours were far more demanding than mine and the nature of his job often meant he was working late or on weekends, which he hated. As a result we didn't really have social lives other than an occasional trip downtown to the bars where we would drink beer, bitch about work, and unsuccessfully try to pick up women. So it was almost by pure luck that I met Aly Nguyen.

Aly, short for Alyson, had been a friend of Brian's at UC Davis. She had grown up in Fresno as a teenager after her parents had moved to the Central Valley to escape the cost of living in the Bay Area. They had hung out together with the same crowd and she had gone with him to a couple of his fraternity events, but they were always too tight to date or even mess around. They weren't best friends, but they were close enough to be pretty good friends. She was busy working her way through a nursing program at San Navarro State and had moved to the area in order to complete her credentialing and it was by chance that she found out Brian had taken a job here as well, so she contacted him. As a result I met her through Brian and things got pretty interesting from there.

I was smitten with her from the start. Aly was what you would call a hottie, a dime, a "Perfect Ten," by any stretch of the imagination. Slim frame, long legs, shoulder-length black hair with a few red highlights which she usually kept tied back in a ponytail, an amazing body, and to top it off she was both highly intelligent and a sweetheart to boot. Aly was the kind of girl that my mother used to refer to as a "keeper" and the kind of girl that I was deathly afraid of and intimidated by. We got along pretty well and we shared similar interests of Mexican food, really bad action movies, and John Steinbeck novels, but the fact that I was so damned intimidated of her always held me back. And it definitely made things sort of awkward between us.

"You giant puss, just ask her out," Brian would say with a frown on his face. "Dude I know Aly, we've been friends for years. She may be a smoking hottie, but she's not a bitch. She'll give you a shot."

But no matter what Brian said, I could never bring myself to do it. That deep-rooted insecurity of mine could never let me express my feelings. And so those emotions went unsaid, buried deep inside me, like steam under the lid of a pressure cooker. I knew one day it would probably explode and God, I hoped it wouldn't be awkward.

The day before everything went to hell was pretty much like any other day. My shift ended around five and I got home, tired, frustrated, and sick of dealing with people. Brian was supposedly working from home that day, but his schedule on these days generally consisted more of smoking pot and channel surfing rather than getting actual work done. Lo and behold, that's exactly what he was doing when I got home.

"I'm back," I called out, shutting the front door behind me, and walking into the small cramped space that served as our kitchen. Opening the door of our beat-up old Maytag, I scanned the inside of the refrigerator. Hopefully there was something cold to drink in there, preferably a beverage of the adult nature.

"Work suck today?" called out Brian from the living room where the scent of pot was already thick and pungent. The haze was as thick as any Central Valley fog and twice as potent. "How many customers decided to bitch at your ass today?"

"Just a couple," I replied as I continued to dig through the fridge. _Yes! Beer_. Grabbing one of the remaining bottles of Budweiser, I closed the fridge with one hand and then popped the top off. The ice-cold beer felt great as I tipped back the bottle and took a long swig, the chilly temperature of the beverage temporarily helping me forget the bullshit of the day. Tossing my tie over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, I stepped through the pot haze to the living room, still swigging away at the beer.

"Yeah you got lucky then," said Brian. He was lounging on our old beat-up leather couch in his typical "work from home" attire: a pair of beat-up UC Davis gym shots, a backwards San Francisco Giants baseball cap, and a faded black Volcom t-shirt. His laptop was on the table in front of him, along with an ashtray containing a neatly rolled smoldering joint, and a few scattered work reports. The work wasn't his primary concern though; he was more focused on the hockey game that was being projected on our modest 27" flatscreen HDTV. I dropped down next to him on the couch.

"It's already 2-1?" I said as I rolled up my shirtsleeves and took another sip of Budweiser. Brian reached over and took the joint from the ashtray and took a hit, inhaling deeply, before blowing out the smoke and handing it to me. "Who scored?"

"Pavelski and Marleau scored for the Sharks. Franzen for the Red Wings," Brian replied. "Fucking Detroit's been pushing hard to get the score tied up though." As if on cue the puck flew into the back of San Jose's net, over the sprawling form of Nabokov, and the crowd in Detroit cheered as the goal horn went off. "What did I fucking tell you, right? Fucccccckkkkk."

I took a deep toke off the joint, pulling the smoke into my lungs, and then passed the joint to Brian and blew out the smoke in a long trail. "Defense blew that one," I noted as I finished the beer and placed the empty bottle on the coffee table. "Can't play like that in the defensive zone against a team like the Wings."

"I know, right?" groaned Brian. He finished the rest of the joint and put it out in the ashtray, frowning as he watched the game. "Terrible play."

My phone buzzed in my pocket and I pulled it out, flipping open the screen to reveal a text message from Aly.

**From Aly:**_ hey! is it ok if i come over for a little while?_

I quickly texted her back.

**To Aly**_: yeah, totally fine. come on in when u get here, door's unlocked._

I snapped my phone closed and Brian looked up at me with a quizzical look on his face. "Who was that?" he asked, feigning ignorance like he didn't know. "Was it…..ALY!"

"Maybe."

"You need to stop being such a little bitch about this and just ASK. HER. OUT. She'll give you a chance, I guarantee it. You guys get along, you have similar interests, look, she even texts you instead of me now. She would SO give you a chance if you weren't being such a damn baby about it."

"Hey shut the fuck up. You know how I feel about her. I'm just nervous is all."

"Is 'nervous' a new synonym for "I'm a giant baby bitch?""

"Shut up."

On screen the Sharks had managed to draw a power play with Brian Rafalski serving a two minute penalty for tripping. The power play had hardly started when Dan Boyle fired a slapshot past the Detroit goalie to give the Sharks a 3-2 lead. The sound of booing from the Detroit fans on the TV mingled with Brian's whoops of joy and his foul language as he cursed both the Red Wings and their fans. I remained slightly more restrained, but I hooted and hollered with him as the Sharks celebrated on screen. We were both so busy celebrating that we didn't hear the front door open.

"You boys certainly look excited," laughed a feminine voice behind us and we turned around to find Aly standing in our living room. She was wearing a pair of faded blue jeans with some flats and a white v-neck t-shirt with her hair undone behind her in a wave of iridescent blackness. Her smile sparkled as she laughed in our direction and for a moment I thought I felt my heart stop.

Brian was the first one to say something. "Oh hey Aly. Sorry the Sharks just scored, so we're kinda stoked about that. How did you get here so fast?"

"Oh I was doing some residency work over at Mercy General today instead of St. James Memorial so I was a lot closer to your house, seeing as Mercy is only a few blocks away. I haven't seen you boys in awhile, I missed you!" she said, stepping forward to give Brian a hug.

"We've missed you too. Some of us more than others," said Brian, shooting a goofy look in my direction where Aly couldn't see. I shot him a quick middle finger, and then hid it as Aly turned around to face me. Our eyes met and she hesitated a bit as she moved towards me which she hadn't done with Brian. I felt a little wave of panic wash over me. Was she hesitating because she was interested in me or was she hesitating because she thought I was awkward? Oh shit.

"Hey Danny," she said, folding me into her arms, and I swear that I almost melted into it. Her arms closed around my back as she gave me a quick hug and then stepped back. "How's the cell phone business?"

"Uh it still sort of sucks," I replied awkwardly, scratching my head. "Long hours, the pay's pretty low, you know."

"I see," she replied, her eyes sort of focused away from me and on the wall over our TV, which suited me fine since my eyes were angled down at her feet, away from her stare. Out of the corner of my eye I caught Brian rolling his eyes at me and I made a quick mental note to get him back later. "What about that plan you had to finish college at SNSU?"

"SNSU has the same programs that I took in San Jose, but I still can't pay the tuition yet," I replied. "My dad still hasn't found a new job yet and between my rent and stuff here and trying to help them out, I don't really have any money. I would take out more student loans, but I'm still paying off the ones I took out at San Jose State."

I risked a look up at her face. It was softened, not in an expression of pity, but in an expression of compassion and understanding. "Wow. You're such a good son to your parents. I mean it's really admirable the way that you take care of them. I wish I could do the same."

I smiled a bit at that. "It's nothing big, I just try my best to help them out when they need it. And don't worry, your parents are financially secure with that store they own in Fresno and they've never been afraid to show their love for you. You're a great daughter."

"Thanks," she replied with a dazzling smile, as she reached out to briefly touch my shoulder, before taking a seat on the couch. I plopped down at the far end next to her, shoulder to shoulder. I could feel her body slightly shift against mine and she looked over at me once with an expression I couldn't place. Shyness? Interest? Awkwardness? Plain old "get off me?" I couldn't tell. Should I put an arm around her shoulder? Lean in closer? Tell her how much I was smitten with her? I couldn't decide.

The moment passed as Brian handed us a freshly rolled joint. But if I had known what tomorrow would bring, would I have still hesitated?


	3. Real Life

The Day began like any other day, in fact exactly like every other day of my life. I woke up around six or seven, showered, put on the slacks, collared shirt, tie, and Verizon sales member pin, grabbed breakfast at McDonalds, and then went into work for a day of bludgeoning boredom. Brian was still sleeping in his room by the time I left since his workplace was only fifteen minutes away and he didn't have to be at work until nine AM, so he generally got to sleep later than I did. Lucky bastard.

It was around eight when I pulled my old Honda Civic into the parking lot at the Westmont Acres Shopping Center. The name made it sound pretty attractive and I guess it was an okay place, considering it was brand new and all, but no amount of sexy descriptive language could disguise the fact that it was basically another suburban crackerbox contraption. Faux Spanish tiling, faux adobe walls, and the usual types of businesses that you could expect in a middle-class soccer mom _centre du shopping_; Target, a frozen yogurt place, a drive-through Burger King, a Bank of America, a Safeway, and the obligatory Starbucks. Not to mention my personal place of employment.

My manager, a kind-faced middle-aged Indian guy, whom I referred to as Mr. Sikand was already inside, setting up a few of the displays for the day. Pulling open the front door, I nodded at him, walking to the computer with my morning coffee in hand to clock in for the day. Couple of clicks, couple of commands tapped into the keyboard, and I was ready to go. On the clock for the day and ready to sell America what it couldn't live without: cell phone coverage.

This job sucked when it was busy, but it sucked even more when it was slow. A couple other co-workers had showed up, but 9 AM we had no customers, so Mr. Sikand had us out cleaning the showroom windows and the electronics on the sales floor to make sure they were attractive. It was basically about as interesting as watching paint dry while listening to War and Peace being read to you by Barry Manilow. And about as sleep-inducing as well.

I don't know who noticed the smoke first, but Mr. Sikand was the first one to say something. "Hey. What do you make of that?" he said, pointing out through the spic-and-span showroom window at what looked like several columns of dirty black smoke billowing in the distance. They weren't clustered together like what you might expect if a large fire had broken out in a contained area, but they were spread out over what looked like several miles. Evidently there was more than one going on.

One of my co-workers opened the door and stepped outside and we followed him. Immediately we were swarmed by a cacophony of noise; helicopter rotors, emergency sirens, honking horns, and the sounds of people yelling at one another. And then far off in the distance, a series of dull pops that sounded like a string of firecrackers going off.

"What the fuck?" uttered one of my co-workers, his eyes fixated on the smoke in the distance. "Is it just me or did that shit just sound like…."

"Fucking gunshots," finished one of my other co-workers. She backed up into the store, already reaching for her phone. "I'm fucking calling the cops."

"I think it's best if we all go back inside," said Mr. Sikand, a sort of strange absent look on his face. "Come on Danny, let's go back inside. We will call the police and try to find out what is going on."

"Yeah…" I muttered as I started stepping backwards towards the store. My trance was suddenly broken by the sight of a red GMC pickup trick speeding down the shopping center's driveway. The driver, a young man wearing a torn red flannel shirt with a trucker hat on over his long blonde hair, leaned as far out of the passenger window as he could get. His left hand was on the truck's steering wheel, but his right hand clasped what looked like a handgun. There was what looked like a bloody bandage on the same hand, but at the speed he was driving it was hard to make out.

"What the hell's going on?" I managed to shout out towards the truck. The driver's eyes locked on me and I could see an emotion in them that froze my blood. The look in his wasn't the mania of a crazy man or harmful intent. It was something far more primal, far more animalistic. Pure ice-cold fear. His was the face of a man who had seen something so horrific that the only thing he could do was to get as far away from it as fast as possible.

"-get the hell outta here!" screamed the driver as the truck careened past. "You aren't safe here! Those bastards are right behind me! Get goin' while you still can! They're not gonna stop!" With that, the driver floored it and whatever else he said was lost in the flurry of noise from the truck and the cacophony of noise in the distance.

I staggered back into the store, slamming it shut behind me, and locking it. Who were they and why was this guy, who was armed in any case, so afraid of them? Just what the fuck was going on here?

I turned around to face my co-workers; three of them plus Mr. Sikand who was busy loading what looked like a snub-nosed .38 caliber revolver. The sight was so bizarre that I nearly burst out laughing. Kindly-looking Mr. Sikand who was always so polite with the customers loading a gun in a Verizon store? It was almost something out of the Twilight Zone.

Mr. Sikand noticed the look that I was giving him and he shrugged. "I worked in a liquor store in Oakland when I first got to America," he said, slipping the last and final bullet into the revolver's cylinder and snapping it closed. "I used to keep this under my counter for self-defense. Old habits die hard, yes."

My female co-worker threw her phone to the carpet in frustration. "I've been trying to get through to 911 and I can't even reach an operator. All it keeps saying is 'All circuits are presently busy, please try again later.' Seriously what the fuck is going on?"

"Hold on!" shouted my other co-worker, his Blackberry in hand. "My news app is going haywire. Let me pull this up." His fingers deftly navigated over the Blackberry's keypad, pulling up a live Internet news feed from CNN. A rather rumpled-looking Wolf Blitzer came up on the small screen and I could feel my breath catch in my throat as I recognized the same emotion in his eyes that I had seen in the eyes of the truck driver.

Fear.

"-are getting unconfirmed reports that a viral infection has popped up throughout the continental United States, Mexico, and Canada. I repeat, we are getting unconfirmed reports that a viral infection has been detected in the continental United States, Canada, and Mexico."

The next news feed. The press room of the White House. The Chairman of CEDA, Thomas Stamkovich, standing behind that wooden podium, the familiar emblem of the White House emblazoned on those blue curtains behind him.

"At around 6 AM Eastern Standard Time, CEDA received initial reports of an outbreak of an infectious virus in locations across North America. We would like to be on record as saying that this virus does not appear to be airborne at this time, however it is transmissible through bodily contact. We are in the process of dispatching research units to the affected locations with the assistance of federal, state, and local authorities. At this time we would like to implore the American population to remain calm and not panic…"

Yet another news feed.

"-growing reports of civil unrest and violence in what CEDA has termed the 'infected zones.' Several states along the Eastern Seaboard are reporting that their law enforcement agencies are working overtime and there are unconfirmed reports that the Governor of Georgia has declared martial law…"

Images of National Guardsmen, wearing what look like chemical-biological warfare suits and armed with what look like M16 rifles climbing out of the back of a truck with a Georgia state flag flying from it. One Guardsman turns to the camera and places his khaki rubber-gloved hand over the lens. Image goes black.

One more.

"-authorities are asking people to stay inside, lock their doors, and cooperate fully with law enforcement. If you encounter anyone who is infected or you yourself are infected, please immediately inform the authorities and wait for assistance."

He turns the feed off and looks at all of us, looks at our faces so clouded with fear and confusion. And that's when the first one thumps against the glass, startling all of us out of our reverie.

There's a man pressed up against one of the store windows, his eyes fixated on us. But they aren't like any eyes I've ever seen. They're bright crimson, the color of hellfire and blood, and they're staring at us so strongly I can literally feel his gaze burning through the thin store glass. There's a look on his face that strikes me as odd for a human being to have towards another, something I've never seen in a person's face before.

Hunger. Pure. Ravenous. Hunger.

He's dressed like a businessman and from the looks of it, he was just on his way to the office in his BMW, Lexus, Mercedes, or other yuppie-mobile, no doubt. Expensive-looking black suit with a pale blue striped tie and a white shirt, patent leather shoes, Rolex watch, and a corporate ID badge fixed to his belt. I can see the holster for a Blackberry or some other PDA-esque device on his hip and would you believe it, the sonofabitch even has his Bluetooth headset in his right ear. And it's then that I notice that it's not just his eyes that are throwing me off….it's his skin. It's a strange-looking pale gray, the same color you get in rain clouds just before a light storm, and it's a dull color that seems to lack the vibrancy, the life, of the skin of the people who are watching him back from inside the windows.

Just as I begin to think that we might need to call the cops, he raises his fists and with seemingly inhuman strength, shatters the store window in one blow. With a howl that chills me to the bone, he rushes forward, grabbing my female co-worker and falling down on top of her. She's screaming, shrill screams of terror that echo in the store, as she frantically scrabbles backward, her arms thrust out in front of her to keep him away.

I can hear my other male co-worker shouting something unintelligible along with Mr. Sikand yelling something that sounds like "You get the hell away from her and put your hands where I can see them, you son of a bitch." But all I can focus on is my co-worker pinned to the ground with this crazy red-eyed bastard on top of her. I want to try to help her, I want to understand why this guy is doing this, but all I can think about is the hunger I saw in his eyes and it chills me to the bone, the terror preventing me from helping her.

And then he bites her.

His teeth sink deeply into her hand and she screams in pain, shrieking in pure terror, as he sinks his front teeth into her, ripping a piece of flesh from the back of her hand. My co-worker tries to curl up in a ball on the floor, trying desperately to shield her body, but this only exposes her back and neck to the crazy gray bastard. He's not just biting her now, he's hitting her, beating her with those strong hands and even raking her with long dirty fingernails. There are bloody scratches on her back from where her shirt's been torn through and she's screaming in pain, writhing on the floor, screaming for someone, anyone, to do something. Now there are deep bite wounds on the back of her neck and her shirt and bra have nearly been ripped cleanly from her body, leaving her upper torso bare and exposed as the man continues to pummel her.

It feels like hours though it's only been seconds.

A gunshot goes off, reverberating through the small space of the store, and in the next instant, the gray man's forehead explodes outward in a shower of flesh, bone, blood, and flecks of grayish-white brain matter. His body goes limp and then falls to the floor, where it makes a show of twitching as the muscles continue to fight the brain trauma that the .38 caliber round has inflicted on the motor center of his brain.

Behind me, Mr. Sikand is trembling, keeping his smoking revolver pointed at the man's body. Behind him I can hear my other co-worker panting something over and over. "Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck." Next to the fallen psychotic, my female co-worker lies unconscious. Blood drips from her various wounds as she lies there, half-naked, the lack of clothing on the top half of her body revealing the cuts, bruises, and bites that that crazy sonofabitch inflicted on her. She looks pretty bad.

"Danny," says Mr. Sikand in a calm voice that belies his shaking arm and sweat-covered forehead. "Go. You go. Go and get the police and an ambulance."

I nod slowly and begin backing away from the scene of carnage in front of me. "What will you do in the meantime?"

"I will stay here and make sure that Angela is all right," he said, referring to my injured female coworker. "Hopefully if more of them come, there aren't more than five of them," he said, opening the cylinder of the revolver to check it.

"No Mr. Sikand, listen, we should all go. I can fit all of you into the car, we could all get out of here…"

"Goddammit Danny!" he shouted in an angry tone of voice I had never heard him us before, not even during the worst sales screw-up or on the most pigheaded customer. "You fucking listen and do what I fucking say. She needs medical help and I have to stay and help her. Now go!"

The next words he says to me are something I will never forget as long as I live. "Don't worry about us Danny. We will be all right, yes."

I tear out of the store at a sprinting clip. In the distance there are even more pillars of smoke, so many that the clouds of dirty blackness are beginning to collect and blot out some of the sunlight. And the noise….the noise is even louder now…..which means it's closer. I can hear a woman screaming somewhere in the distance, a high shrill scream that somehow manages to carry over everything else; the sirens, car horns, helicopter rotors, even the fusillade of gun shots that continually ring out somewhere in the distance.

I opened my car door, slamming it shut behind me, as I coaxed the old Honda to life with a couple turns of the key. I shifted the car into drive and floored it as I took off in the parking lot, my eyes wildly darting around behind the steering wheel as I headed for the main entrance to the shopping center. Just as the tires of the Honda hit the street outside, I see a flood of people swarm the front of the store, surging inside. A few bright flares of light, like a camera flash, go off inside the store…..and then no more.

I fight to clear the tears from my eyes as I drive off.

"_We will be all right, yes."_

_So long Mr. Sikand. _


End file.
